


For your soul is my soul clenched within my fist

by midnightflame



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, Implied Relationships, Implied Sexual Content, Loss, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-02
Updated: 2017-03-02
Packaged: 2018-09-27 19:30:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10042343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightflame/pseuds/midnightflame
Summary: So, when night comes, and the world tells him to fall beneath Sleep’s touch, the monsters come crawling out of his blood, out of the dark of his mind, lured by the guard he had never wanted to let down but had been lowered, night after night, by the warmth pressed against his skin and the bed that suddenly grew too small.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Quick piece for the night before I get to work on other things. Enjoy!

Loss comes in a splendid variety, and Keith has had the great misfortune of coming to learn a fair number of them over the years. The last one had cut deep enough to scar, this thick silver line of it right through the center of his heart, though he hadn’t told Shiro as much and never thought of doing so. But it ached, and it ached, every moment he thought that this life would never hold for him.

That inevitably, somewhere, the joy that had crept into his soul would no longer be there. Gone, with the safe cracked open and the insides staring blankly out at him, reminding him over and over again of everything he had once had to call his very own.

Of all the things he had failed to keep within his hands. 

But it’s so easy to move when the daylight hours burn and the call to arms sounds, to put one foot after the other with gaze locked on all the potential of the world ahead of him. Everything set to the solid tempo of a soldier’s purpose. Because some days, Keith swears he can see into the future, and part of him wants to tear it all down, just to find those little slivers of that life that had been promised to him with every quietly echoing word against his temple, every stolen kiss, every steadfast beat of a heart sitting beneath a surface mapped with scars and bruises, the faint red markings where fingertips had been.

Always battling for the better in a world that told them there would be nothing worth holding onto by the time it was done with them.

The waking hours had never been the problem. They never really are for most men.

It’s at night when the horrors awaken, the ones that sit deep within the shadows of the mind, biding their time as all true terrors do. That little fact Pandora knew nothing about, but Keith had come to learn of it every night when that box was pulled open. This intimate bit of nightmare all his own. Because he knew loss, and he knew the ways it sunk through flesh and right into bone, breeding in his marrow to populate his body at large.

A breathing monument to all the things the world can take from you.

So, when night comes, and the world tells him to fall beneath Sleep’s touch, the monsters come crawling out of his blood, out of the dark of his mind, lured by the guard he had never wanted to let down but had been lowered, night after night, by the warmth pressed against his skin and the bed that suddenly grew too small.

And then the cold set in, and the monsters grew impossibly large.

Every night, Keith finds the shake that comes into his hands, as he sits on the edge of his bed, staring down at the emptiness they hold. And as the Nothingness stares back at him, he can feel the tremble of his heart, quaking there in his chest, fear pumping through it as hard and fast as his blood.

Both turning his thoughts red. For there is nothing he wouldn’t do to reclaim all that was once his, and he thinks, sometimes, that maybe the monster has been him all along. 

And that is when he can see them there, those ghosts of memories, drowning in the river of time, days months and years gone, and they tug, and they pull, and they whisper the sweetest nothings from their watery depths. Telling him that he does not need a heart to wander the world. So, let it bleed and let it burn, and then bury it beneath the waves.

Telling him he could become a hollowed man, fittingly reborn in as cruel an hour as this.

That's when the air rushes out of his lungs, when his head drops against the fists his hands had formed.

And everything in Keith’s world tears itself to pieces, again and again. 

Tomorrow, he will build it all again.


End file.
